“Retail demand for chicken is off the charts,” Wall Street analyst Jeremy Scott told Investor’s Business Daily today. As a result, the stocks of companies converting chickens into food are soaring — seeing increases exceeding 50% in 2017.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), American per capita consumption of chicken is at an all-time high. As a result, animal agriculture companies like Tyson and Sanderson are planning on opening new processing plants with the ability to kill more than 1.25 million birds per week. Not everyone is excited.

These statistics are a sobering reminder that the world is not going vegan. Most people’s desire to eat animals continues to outweigh their concerns about animal agriculture’s environmental impact and sustainability, cruelty to animals, and health risks. Animal products remain ubiquitous.

But there is hope for a major shift away from animal agriculture. Enter The Good Food Institute (GFI).

Uniquely positioned in the food space, GFI works with scientists, investors, and entrepreneurs to disrupt animal agriculture by developing and promoting delicious, healthy, accessible, price-competitive, and sustainable clean meat and plant-based alternatives to animal products. The strategic and forward-thinking team at GFI, working in tandem with clean meat companies like Memphis Meats, has solutions to the world’s food problems. Now they’re focused on inspiring more investors and governments to buy in to bring good food to the masses.

In a recent letter to the USDA, GFI scientific foundations liaison, Dr. Erin Rees Clayton, suggests two solutions to meet the challenge of developing sustainable agriculture for the world.

Clayton points out that people largely base their food choices on price, taste, and convenience. She suggests the USDA can help solve the world’s global food crisis by encouraging the development of clean meat and plant-based meat that will satisfy consumers’ litmus test.

Specifically, Clayton recommends the USDA focus on exploring additional consumer-accepted plant protein sources, and once identified, create delicious plant-based meat from them. Currently, the market is largely dominated by soy and wheat-based meat — with pea protein recently entering the space. According to Bill Gates, 92% of plant-based proteins have yet to be explored to turn into plant-based meats. Imagine the possibilities!

In her letter, Clayton also proposes public and private investment in clean meat research and development to expedite it to mass markets. She underscores the need to improve efficiencies to reduce cost and advance the science to increase productivity and accuracy.

If the USDA is serious about feeding the world’s growing population with safe and healthy food that preserves the planet, they should respond favorably.

“People are eating meat despite how it’s being produced not because of how it’s being produced,” said GFI founder and executive director Bruce Friedrich. GFI is on a mission to give consumers the ability to eat meat made in a way that’s aligned with their values, budget, and health goals — a move that will revolutionize the food industry.

While current trends may be unfavorable, GFI’s groundbreaking work offers promising prospects for the future of food, people’s health, farm animals, and the planet. Although demand for eating chickens will unlikely subside, when GFI achieves its goals, the origin of the chicken meat people eat will likely originate from plants and cells rather than animals. Sometime in the future, the retail demand for it will be “off the charts.”